MOUNT PULASKI - Fred Lipp says you've got to look past the
rockets' red glare and the bombs bursting in air to find the
weapons that gave America's Revolutionary War soldiers the most
bang for the buck.

And he should know; he still makes them: smooth bore and rifled
flintlock long guns measuring almost 5 feet from end to end and
shooting maybe a .54-caliber lead ball with deadly accuracy more
than 50 yards (smooth bore) and four times that for rifles whose
grooved barrels made the projectiles spin and fly straighter,
longer.

The British Redcoats on the receiving end of this spinning and
nonspinning hail of lead were supreme at formation marching and
precision musket firing but suddenly found themselves 1776 target
practice for ragtag bands of rebellious militia using guerrilla
tactics.

Popping up from behind their hedgerows and stone walls, men
seasoned in nailing deer and fowl to put dinner on the table found
it just as easy to erase His Majesty's troops and set about serving
themselves a new nation. And the sturdy, reliable and commonplace
guns they did it with are alluring creations that manage to spit
out annihilation with a surprising degree of style.

Lipp is a retired high school industrial arts teacher living in
Mount Pulaski with an artist's appreciation of the long gun's
fearful symmetry. He runs his work-worn fingers over the flowing
contours of a fiddleback maple stock on a 58-inch-long rifle he
crafted in 1990 and looks impressed. "Look at all this," he says,
pointing to the tigerlike markings making a war paint of the wood.
"All this is God's work, not mine."

Divinity, however, only goes so far when crafting weaponry. From
the graceful shape of the stock that makes it sink into the
shooter's shoulder with consummate ease to the decorative carvings
adorning the wood and the fitting and finish of the gun's intricate
and myriad parts, all is the assured work of the hand of
Lipp.

Everything is accurate and just as it was when Gen. George
Washington barked out orders and men dressed in everything from
tailor-made uniforms to buckskin leveled their sights at the enemy.
Flintlock means that when the trigger is pulled, the gun is fired
by sparks from a piece of flint slammed into a flip-up metal plate
called a "frizzen" with gunpowder underneath. This ignites a much
bigger charge of powder that's been poured into the barrel (from a
cow horn powder flask Lipp also makes) and has had a patch of cloth
and the lead ball rammed home on top.

It's pretty cumbersome for beginners, but seasoned hands could
accomplish loading and firing with reasonable efficiency. The
British, in addition to an obsessive love of formation marching,
stuck with what worked and were not quick to adopt new-fangled
approaches. Lipp points out that an English officer named Ferguson
had come up with what might be called a revolutionary kind of rifle
mechanism that did away with ramming everything down the long
barrel and accelerated the reloading process dramatically.

Happily for their New World foes, King George III's boys never got
their hands on too many of them. "I finally got to shoot one a
couple of weeks ago and see it loaded and everything," says Lipp,
64. "Just so much faster and, I got to tell you, the British should
have won the war with it."

He learned a love of muzzle-loading guns from his dad and has built
more than 10 of them since the bicentennial year of 1976,
occasionally undertaking commissions from fellow firearms fans who
lack his skills. "I just love the shape of the guns, the whole
nostalgia of it all," he says. "Guns like this were considered to
be one of America's first art forms."

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There's a National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, and dedicated
specialists feed the passions of the retro weaponry builders'
market with everything from gun barrels to flintlock mechanisms to
rough-hewn stocks you can finish in your living room. Lipp, who
built, wired and plumbed his own home, doesn't find many of the
gunsmith's tasks too taxing, but it still takes him 300 to 500
hours to build a gun and leave it looking like it's 235 years
old.

"He's a perfectionist," explains his wife, Patsy, for whom he's
built everything from furniture to a little cryptex box, such as
the one in the "Da Vinci Code" book and movie with which you have
to align the letters just right to make it pop open. The magic open
sesame phrase here is "I Love You," and Lipp informs his wife of 45
years that there used to be a tender little message written on
paper inside it, too.

"Oh God, I lost his note," she says, staring at the now opened and
empty box before smiling back at her romantic gun builder. "He
really is very talented," she adds.

Lipp's skill set extends to molding his own projectiles out of
molten lead, and he attends muzzle-loading shooting competitions
where an eye for accuracy as well as finish has seen him bring home
many medals. He dresses up in period costume, too, but admits he
doesn't go as far as some of his fellow shooters. True aficionados,
in the quest for historical accuracy, will even wear loincloths to
imitate the eyebrow-raising fact that some of our Colonial
forebears borrowed this fashion tip from American Indians to
facilitate comfort and ease of movement.

"They'd wear a long shirt, deerskin leggings and then they would
have a loincloth under the long shirt," Lipp says. "Me, I'm not
much of a loincloth-type guy."

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